Hi all,
I have 5-10K worth of funds to spend on new computing equipment. I have a separate set of funds for cloud/cluster computing for large-scale jobs, so this is more for a development/small-jobs computer.
Most of my research involves microarray, sequence analysis (usually not NGS), and what would now be considered 'medium scale' (10-200gb) datasets.
Does anyone have any ideas? I want as much RAM (preferably 128Gb) as possible and a screaming processor but I'm trying to stick within a desktop sized device.
5 answers
I just built up a Dell Precision T7600 Workstation with 16 sandybridge (Xeon E5-2680 @ 2.70GHz) cores and 96GB of RAM. Had to pry it out of my IT dept's hands after they benchmarked the T7600 against a 40 core 1TB SMP with Xeon E7-L8867 @ 2.13GHz (westmere) CPUs on linpack. The new sandybrige cores are blazing!
I've been playing around on their website ... for a fully-loaded ~30K (maxing out RAM, processor, video-card and hard-drive space). But I got something in the ~10-15K range that packs quite a punch ... Dual Eight Core XEON 3.1GHz, 128 Gb of RAM and 6 TB of hard-drive space
Keep in mind if you are going with a workstation with multiple processors you'll usually want to go with ECC registered RAM, which tends to be a little more expensive. But basically find a vendor who will put together a large Intel Xeon machine of some sort. We've bought several in the 5k range but those were usually 12-16Gb of RAM or so. The one I am currently working on is 50Gb of RAM but these were all bought 2-3 years ago.
We recently got a new computing server. It is a Dell machine with 192GB RAM, 24 cores (although half are just hyperthreading), two SSDs (for swap and scratch space), and four 3TB SATA disks. I think this is a reasonable box, and something like it should be within your budget. If you are willing to settle for 32GB RAM and a single CPU socket (i.e. 8 cores), you can get things a lot cheaper using more mainstream components.
Avoid enterprise stuff: SCSI disks, RAID controllers, etc.
Get the a Mac Pro with SSD
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donate it to me :) I like the mac pro machines. They are highly customizable and are not (much) bigger than a regular desktop
I didn't say it was 'extra' money ... just startup money I need to spend on computer equipment
There hasn't been an upgrade to the Mac Pro's in a few years now though. They are getting pretty behind the times unfortunately.
I love the Mac, also, but I agree here that the cost is hard to justify given the availability of very large and fast machines that will run linux.
Sean raises a good point. Is your intention to run Linux on this box? Or dual boot? Or is it more of a workstation where you will work in Windows/OSX and log into your cluster/cloud for linux work? If you want it to be a linux box then I would go with some of the Dell options suggested below. If you want a non-linux workstation then I might recommend the mac pro option over a good Dell Win7 box. Although, I have both and its really six of one, half a dozen of the other in my opinion.